Barack Obama vs Mitt Romney: Who should India vote for?

Whether Americans choose a tall, Harvard-educated lawyer or a tall, Harvard-educated lawyer and businessman as their next president this November might seem like a distinction without a difference as far as Indians are concerned, right up there with which baseball team will win the World Series.

In a more rational world, with $45 billion in annual trade between the two countries and the business lobbies of each country standing by to grease the gears of those long conveyor belts, relations might seem unlikely to change much whoever is living at the White House on January 20.

But that's in a more rational world. The choice here is between two men, who at the moment are locked in a statistical tie.

How the election will affect India's interests is unclear — and may not be clear until well into the next term. A second Obama administration might offer more attention than the first, particularly if relations with Pakistan and China worsen. They can also find India on the map: Sumit Ganguly, a professor of political science at Indiana University who writes often on US-India relations, gives the India team now in place at the State Department high marks for its professionalism.

What might be expected from a Romney administration on the other hand, is much more uncertain. Beyond vague statements offered by aides that he wants better relations with India, the actual substance of his foreign policy is still unclear — towards India or anywhere else. "The few remarks he has made are either sweeping or foolish," says Ganguly.

So if you can't look at the track record, or in Romney's case, even his statements, what else is there to go by?

AFFINITY TOWARDS FOREIGNNESS

How comfortable the candidate feels with foreigners might be one clue. With a Kenyan father, an American mother trained as an anthropologist, and a childhood spent in Indonesia and multiracial Hawaii, Obama has spent his whole life looking at multiple sides of racial and ethnic divides — and in office, has proven much more sensitive than some of his predecessors to the complexities of the world.

By contrast, Romney grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, one of the richest small towns in America, a largely white suburb of Detroit where average household income even today is $320,000 a year, according to US census data. His father, George Romney, was a self-made man — a media-savvy automobile executive who became governor of Michigan, and eventually the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Richard Nixon.

On the whole, Romney seems ill at ease with foreign things, with the exception of offshore bank accounts. He can speak French, thanks to two years spent as a Mormon missionary to France, but the experience sounds like a grim memory, between a serious car accident and the thankless task of trying to sell a tee-totalling religion to a country where some people even knock back a glass at breakfast (and in 1967 and 1968 no less, when per capita consumption was double where it is today — nearly 118 liters per year, according to University of California at Davis statistics). Certainly his first overseas campaign tour did not go well. Unlike Obama, who drew crowds everywhere in Europe on his first overseas trip, Romney had a hard time on his trip to Israel, Poland, and the United Kingdom. In less than a week, Team Romney managed to say things that were offensive to Palestinians, Mexicans, Ecuadorians, in comments that implied that they were poorer than their neighbours because they had lazy cultures, and even annoyed the British, by suggesting that they might have trouble pulling off the London Olympics — a comment that earned him the stinging tabloid headline Mitt The Twit.

That doesn't immediately mean he would be a bad president. Many presidents have succeeded on the global stage who didn't have much foreign policy experience before they began office. Harry Truman, for instance, saved Europe with the Marshall Plan. However, they do have to be good politicians, and the sort of stumbles Romney suffered abroad aren't just something that flares up outside the country — they're part of a general tone-deafness that has kept his likeability ranking 23 per cent behind Obama, according to a recent Gallup poll even as the election itself remains a toss up.

Comments such as his widely quoted "Corporations are people, my friend," may have been taken out of context, but suggest a profound lack of savvy given the strong level of anti-corporate feeling in the country right now.

Part of the problem may be body language. Patti Wood, an Atlanta body language expert, marvelled during the 2008 elections that Obama could almost transform himself, depending on the audience, and in a way that was always convincing.